As people and projects get fired up in this first half of 2023, learning Oracle Intelligent Advisor the right way, and learning to use it the right way, is of critical importance. Only in the last three months, in our role as auditors of Oracle Policy Modeling and Decision Service projects, we have had to give negative opinions and put pressure on organizations to train their teams properly. Some of the projects have been very poor in terms of respecting (or not) the documented best practices and recommendations in the documentation and elsewhere.
Over the next few articles we will look at some of the most challenging aspects and hopefully provide pointers to how to approach best practices in the future. We want customers to succeed – it’s all about the customer. As consultants we are responsible for their journey and their success. So we can start with attributes and grammar, as they are often very visible examples of failure to meet even basic good practice. This can also help you if you are preparing to take your certification exam in the near future to ensure you are “on the ball”.
Attributes and Wording – Best Practices
We shall start our investigation of the best practices by focusing on the simplest items of all – the attributes. And even more specifically, we will look at boolean attributes and their statements.
Before anyone begins working with Oracle Intelligent Advisor, they need to understand the different layers of the application – commonly shown in a diagram like this one:
Attributes are part of the abstract layer – they are an abstraction of the connection layer and they are used to build rules in Word and Excel. They should not be confused with Controls and Labels (as they sadly often are). More on that in the next post.
Let’s have a little fun – and we offer you a quiz for you to decide what is wrong with the following attribute. Good luck! As a bonus, once you have given your suggestion, you will see the list of recommendations and get a link to the excellent best practice guide written by our great friend Jasmine Lee, all-round master of things OIA.
To take the quiz just click the button below. Let’s see how you fare!
The Attribute Quiz
Time limit: 0
Quiz-summary
0 of 1 questions completed
Questions:
1
Information
Can you spot things that don’t match best practice in Oracle Policy Modeling Enjoy our free quiz!
You have already completed the quiz before. Hence you can not start it again.
Quiz is loading...
You must sign in or sign up to start the quiz.
You have to finish following quiz, to start this quiz:
Results
0 of 1 questions answered correctly
Time has elapsed
Categories
Oracle Policy Modeler0%
Thanks for playing!
1
Answered
Review
Question 1 of 1
1. Question
1 points
Category: Oracle Policy Modeler
The example attribute text shown here does not conform to best practices. Can you spot which recommendations it does not follow?
Correct
That’s right. It doesn’t conform to many basic rules for attributes. For reference purposes, here is the list (not all apply to the example, but it is useful to read them all)
Statements should start with the definite article (“the”), not the indefinite article (“a”, “an”) Statements should use correct spelling, grammar and punctuation Statements should be complete grammatical sentences Statements should be written in the third person Statements must be able to be negated Statements should represent a single concept Statements should not use contractions Statements should make sense without reference to another statement Statement should be kept simple but explicit Statements should indicate entity membership Statements should not use personal pronouns Statements which refer to amounts should indicate the unit of measurement Statements should be worded consistently where possible
Not quite. Here is the list (not all apply to the example, but it is useful to read them all)
Statements should start with the definite article (“the”), not the indefinite article (“a”, “an”) Statements should use correct spelling, grammar and punctuation Statements should be complete grammatical sentences Statements should be written in the third person Statements must be able to be negated Statements should represent a single concept Statements should not use contractions Statements should make sense without reference to another statement Statement should be kept simple but explicit Statements should indicate entity membership Statements should not use personal pronouns Statements which refer to amounts should indicate the unit of measurement Statements should be worded consistently where possible
